90%+ chance this is a total psyop.
"Gates' pull is also political. He is close to the Clintons and initially supported Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential run. He has met Obama often enough to host a fund-raiser for his successful U.S. Senate race in 2004, and Gates has said he contributed the maximum allowable amount to Obama's presidential campaign."
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/20090726_A_scholar_in_the_fray__Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr_.html
Posted on Sun, Jul. 26, 2009
A scholar in the fray: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
Decades ago - long before Harvard, long before his books and documentaries - Henry Louis Gates Jr. and some friends nearly set off a brawl trying to integrate a West Virginia club.
Gates and the others were circled by a white mob. The owner screamed at the black students to leave, slamming one of them against a wall. The club was shut down, but Gates had been marked: West Virginia police, he would write in his memoir, placed him on a list of those who might be detained should race riots break out during election time.
"Someone in authority had decided I was dangerous?" he wrote. "I mean, I liked to think so."
Gates rarely has been considered a dangerous man. Gregarious, outgoing, media savvy - yes. But in the years after the confrontation in Keyser, W.Va., his unrelenting focus on black life in America was intellectual. He has written essays, compiled reference works, searched for slave narratives, produced documentaries, assembled a mighty team of colleagues at Harvard.
"He's unquestionably one of the great public intellectuals," said David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, for which Gates has been a contributor. "He puts people together; he makes a million speeches. . . . I think he has 50 honorary degrees by now."
Now a dispute with police has brought Gates down into the arena once again. He was suspected of breaking into a house - his own - and then charged with disorderly conduct after arguing with a police officer.
The charge was quickly dropped, but the news did not end, for Gates is the most well-connected of men, a friend of at least two presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and a scholar whose arrest was worthy of mention at a White House news conference.
Responding to a reporter's question Wednesday night, President Obama said that he didn't know all the facts but that the Cambridge, Mass., police "acted stupidly" by citing Gates for disorderly conduct. He later said he regretted his comments, though he believed that both Gates and the police officer overreacted.
Gates, for his part, says he is ready to move on. In a statement yesterday, he promised to do all he could so that others could learn from his arrest. "This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America," Gates said.
And after a call from Obama, Gates said Friday that he would accept the president's invitation to the White House for a beer with him and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley.
Gates' life has been an almost perfect arc of energy and ascent. A mill worker's son, he graduated with honors from Yale and has devoted himself to discovering and explaining the very marrow of the black past.
As head of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, Gates has consciously tried to build upon Du Bois' scholarship and to live out, and up to, his place in what Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth" of black elites.
He has told his own story in a memoir,
Colored People. Gates was born in 1950 in Piedmont, W.Va., then a segregated mill community. His first knowledge of whites was through television, in sitcoms such as
The Life of Riley, which featured a factory worker, like Gates' own father. His family initially had little interest in protest, wondering why black people would want to eat at white-owned restaurants given that it was well established that whites couldn't cook.
"Civil rights took us all by surprise," wrote Gates, whose life was changed, as millions were, by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing the "separate but equal" doctrine in public schools.
Just two years later, Gates began at the Davis Free Elementary School, integrated in 1955 and virtually the only place in Piedmont where blacks and whites gathered together. Gates arrived more determined than afraid. He was "marked out to excel," an early reader and writer "blessed with the belief that I could learn anything."
"I was all set to become the little prince of that almost all-white school," he wrote.
He was an A student who loved history and geography and would practice the way African leaders' names were pronounced by following the newscasts of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He gave his high school valedictory address and graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where he majored in history.
To his eventual embarrassment, he wrote in his Yale application:
"As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself."
He was substantial enough to get into Yale anyway, politicized enough to protest racism and the Vietnam War, but never so disheartened by his country that he didn't consider himself a part of it.
As a scholar, he has advocated African American history as part of American history, unwilling to enter the "sweepstakes of oppression."
Gates' pull is also political. He is close to the Clintons and initially supported Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential run. He has met Obama often enough to host a fund-raiser for his successful U.S. Senate race in 2004, and Gates has said he contributed the maximum allowable amount to Obama's presidential campaign.
